Business Insight Zone

Let me tell you a funny story.

Some time ago I started working on this post — wrote the title, found the creepy picture, added “related links” at the bottom, blasted out a bunch of ideas.

I say “some time ago,” but a quick search of Twitter tells me that it was actually September 29, because that’s when I polled my friends about this very topic. So for two months now, “Killing off a vampire project” has been staring at me, day after day, from my blog drafting folder. I believe this is a mild form of what’s called irony.

Anyway, today I decided I’d had enough.

The Project That Will Not Die

We all have them, right?

• The nagging task that’s too big for a chore but too small for a holy war.
• That Unfinished Thing Upon Which So Many Others Depend.
• The project that that goes bump in the night, scaring us out of our sleep even though we know it shouldn’t.
• _____________ [fill in the blank with your own horror story here]

What to do?

• Suggestion #1: “If I knew then what I know now . . .” — Ask yourself whether you’d launch the project all over again today, if you were starting fresh. Would it be worth it? If the answer is “No,” just kill the project in some way that lets you hold your head up high.
• Suggestion #2: Cry out for help. — In the old vampire movies, the would-be victims were often saved by the timely arrival of help from the outside. In the case of vampire projects, you might find that you nervously broach the prospect of killing or modifying the project with others affected by it, only to find out that everybody else breathes a sigh of relief that you suggested it.
• Suggestion #3: Brutal honesty. — Sometimes your boss (or your boss’s boss, or whoever) needs to hear that the project is an outright waste of money, and that any more time spent on it is unconscionable. If that’s the truth, figure out a polite but blunt way to say it today.
• Suggestion #4: Analyze it from the outside. — If you’re not sure whether the project is an outright waste, consider whether you’ve become trapped in the mire of sunk costs. Sometimes we want to plow ahead with a project simply because we’ve spent so much time with it. We get wrapped around the axle of our own emotions. If that’s the case, review the project like an outside analyst would. If you were coming to this situation with no preconceptions, what would you think? What questions would you ask? What next steps would you recommend?
• Suggestion #5: Do the minimum. — For some people in particular, it’s easy to get lost in grandiose visions of what could be. I’m not just going to write an RFP; I’m going to write the Crime and Punishment of RFPs! Sure you are. Instead, dial it back, figure out the minimum needed for a passing grade, and forget about earning an A+ on this project. Sometimes, constraining yourself to do things fast-and-light unlocks all sorts of creative energy.
• Suggestion #6: Swiss cheese. — I first learned of this approach from Alan Lakein in his classic book, How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. The method is to complete the handiest bits of your project so that it looks (figuratively) like Swiss cheese when you’re done. So, for example, if part of it involves talking on the phone with someone you enjoy talking to, dial them up and do just that part. Or if you have to do some tedious collating, schedule it for the deadest time of your day so you can do it mechanically. By carving bits out of the project, this method gives you momentum at the same time that it cuts the project down to size.
• Suggestion #7: The priority principle. — This is something that Arnold Schwarzenegger employed to correct his deficiencies as a bodybuilder. (Believe it or not, he had some.) He would pick a weak body part, for example his calves, and hit them first and most often during his workouts. For your project, book meetings with yourself first thing in the morning and first thing after lunch every day. If you hit it early and often, you can even work slowly and you’ll still get the thing done before you know it.
• Suggestion #8: Call in an expert. — Are you the right person to do this job? Even if you have no budget to outsource it, there may be someone in your organization who can do the work — even have fun doing it — in half the time it would take you. When Hoover’s organized a formal community-outreach committee a few years ago, I was one of its first co-chairs. My other co-chair and I still laugh about one vampire project from those days, which had both of us flummoxed until we realized we had split the duties the wrong way. I took her part, she took my part, and we were done in what felt like minutes. Sometimes it’s just that easy.
• Suggestion #9: Make it funny, or sexy, or cool. — You’ve been thinking of this thing as a massive piece of drudgery, and maybe it is. But is there any way that it might not be? Is there some way to “whistle while you work,” or to make this project a winner for you, your department, your resume? Sometimes a little bit of time spent pondering this can energize you to take on the vampire bare-handed.
• Suggestion #10: Ask for more budget. — This one was suggested by a friend on Twitter. (But I can’t find the right tweet! Please let me know if you find it.) He suggested that asking for more money could achieve one of two things: (1) give you the resources you need to finish the project right, or (2) demonstrate to those who control the budget that the project can’t be done without investing more than the organization is willing to commit. Either outcome gives you a light at the end of the tunnel.

Those are just ten possible techniques; I’m sure there are many more.

So, what do YOU do to kill off vampire projects?

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Related posts:

• When is it time to kill a project?
• What is it time to let go of?
• “Workiness” is to work as “truthiness” is to truth.
  

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Image by guano, used under a CC-Share Alike license.